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All about field archery

doing Field Archery

To learn more, find out everything you need to know about field archery.

What is Field Archery?

Field archery is a discipline that consists of shooting at fixed circular targets on a course in natural terrain. These targets will be in different sizes and will be placed at varying distances, heights and angles.

Generally, archers shoot at a distance of 5 to 60 meters on black and yellow targets. This distance is marked when it is known by the archer and unmarked when it is unknown.

What are the targets for field archery like?

First of all, you should be aware that there are 4 different sized targets for field archery: 80cm, 60cm, 40cm and 20cm in diameter.

The archers who practice field archery shoot at yellow and black targets containing six concentric scoring rings. The center ring scores 6 points while the outer ring scores 1 point. The yellow rings count for 6 and 5 points while the black rings count 4, 3, 2 and 1 point. When the target is tagged, the score is zero.

These targets will be set up on marked courses so that archers can shoot safely, retrieve their arrows and move on. They are usually grouped in fours. The shooting positions are marked on the ground with stakes for the archers to see.

How does a field archery competition work?

A field archery competition consists of three events: the individual event, the mixed doubles event and the team event.

A mixed team consists of one male and one female archer. They must shoot in the same bow category.

A team consists of three archers of the same gender. Each archer shoots in different bow categories, including the classical bow, the compound bow and the barebow.

A competition consists of three phases including:

  • A course of 24 targets that are at unknown distances.
  • A course of 24 targets at known distances
  • A course of 12 targets at unknown distances and another course of 12 targets at unknown distance

Archers will be ranked according to their total points for the individual event. The first two archers with more points will be exempted from the pool phase. They will automatically advance to the semi-finals.

For the mixed event and team event, there are the seeds for the game table. For the mixed doubles event, the seeds will be determined by the highest ranked man and woman from the same country. The seeds for the team event will be determined by the ranking of the three best archers of the same sex of a country. These are the best score archers.

Regarding the pool phase, please note that it applies only to the individual event. For this phase, archers will be divided into groups. The lowest ranked archer in each pool will compete. The losing archer will be eliminated and the winning archer will face the next archer and so on until there is only one archer left in each pool. Then the winners from the two will compete in the final.

How do you keep score?

In field archery, all matches are played in a cumulative score format to finish with the highest score.

A match consists of 15 arrows for an individual match, 16 arrows for a mixed doubles match and 24 arrows for a team match. For a mixed doubles match, each archer will shoot 8 arrows while for a team match, each archer will shoot 8 arrows each.

It should be noted that for field archery, a time limit of 3 minutes per target will be allowed from the moment where the archer takes his shooting position. The archer must therefore take up his position quickly as soon as the shooting stand is free. A field competition usually lasts for one day.